Compression Trouble (???) Example

I've been trying to export a clip directly from FCP to up load to youtube. It hasn't been going well. What I started to do was just export a full size Quicktime move and them "make another export from that". Quality has been OK BUT i don't always l;ike how my text and transitions come out...

Well, trying to get good quality video on YouTube is like trying to take a good picture with a Xerox printer. What is the bit rate that you uploaded to Youtube? Youtube will recompress everything you give it. I ran a short test on this a few months ago...

At 2Mb/s:

At 6.5Mb/s:

At 9Mb/s:

At 24Mb/s (relatively similar to the H.264 compression from the Canon cameras):

From this test, I came to the assumption that the main reason why Youtube uploads from the Canon cameras look better than most videos on Youtube, is because most of those folks edit H.264 natively and end up with a 24Mb/s H.264 file which Youtube then recompresses. This bitrate is significantly higher than Apple's setting for Youtube.

But yea, Youtube recompresses quite heavily, and the best you can do is to give it the best you can- as high a bitrate as possible.